POET Options: The Map Rolled Down Into Triple Witching

Where are the Black Cats on Triple Witch

Monday didn't spare anyone. Over the weekend, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay urging AI companies to slow the pace of frontier model development, and OpenAI's Sam Altman publicly agreed. Wall Street heard “slower buildout” and sold first. Chips took the worst of it — the benchmark semiconductor index sank nearly 6%, with Nvidia $NVDA and Broadcom $AVGO both lower. Brent crude topped $108. The 10-year Treasury yield pushed through 5% for the first time since 2023. All of it landed two days before a Fed decision.

POET Technologies $POET was down 6.9% at $7.41 by late morning on 4.4 million shares. No company news. No filing. Just a high-beta photonics name caught in a sector-wide air pocket. We've covered days like this before — days when chip stocks fall for reasons that have nothing to do with any one company's business. This is one of them.

The round trip is complete

A month ago the stock printed $9.65 and the options map had just rolled up a dollar. Then came the fade to the $8 pin at August expiration. Now $7.41. Up and down like a yo-yo — and the options board tells you where the string is.

What the gap hides

Look under the hood and the day gets more interesting. Nearly all of the loss came in the overnight gap. The stock opened near $7.39 — the opening print alone crossed 126,700 shares — and it's actually up about half a percent since. Sellers set the price before the bell. The regular session hasn't pushed it lower.

Volume is running at 149% of typical, and roughly 60% of it is trading off-exchange. Five of the day's ten largest prints were dark-venue blocks between $7.36 and $7.50, including three separate 60,000-share prints at $7.50. Someone is using the gap to move size, quietly.

The borrow data says this isn't a short attack either. The fee to borrow shares sits around half a percent, with roughly 10 million shares available to locate — nothing like the squeeze mechanics we tracked in May. Cheap borrow, dark blocks, and a flat tape since the open reads like repositioning, not a raid.

One more tell. Options flow leaned toward calls all month: the put/call volume ratio ran between 0.12 and 0.44 through early September, call-heavy even on red days. Today's put buying at $7 and $7.50 is the first real hedging we've seen in weeks.

What dies on Friday

Friday, September 18, is quarterly triple witching. Stock options, index options, and index futures all expire together. It's usually one of the heaviest volume days of the quarter, and for $POET it's a cleanup date.

The August rally left a wall of call open interest stranded overhead. By our count, more than 31,000 contracts sit at $8 and above on the September 18 line alone: 8,039 at the $8 strike, 7,708 at $8.50, 3,634 at $9, and 7,474 still parked at $10 — a leftover from the post-earnings chase. At $7.41, every one of them is out of the money. Hold down here through Friday's close and the whole complex expires worthless and comes off the board.

That matters for the mechanics. Dealers who sold those calls have carried smaller and smaller hedges as the stock fell. Expiration finishes the job. The overhead resistance those strikes represented — dealer selling into every rally toward $8 and $8.50 — is gone Monday morning.

The near map

The battleground strike is $7. On the September 18 line it carries 6,692 calls against 2,007 puts, and the puts traded 250 contracts by late morning — flow that's testing the floor, not chasing a bounce. There's fresh put interest at $7.50 too. Below the market, the insurance is visible: 2,066 puts at $6 and a 4,016-contract block at the $5 strike. Someone is carrying disaster protection. And the $8 puts — 3,496 of them — are now in the money.

What's left after the cleanup

Roll forward one week and one strike dominates everything: 12,726 calls at the September 25 $8.50 line, the largest single position anywhere on the board. That's the new wall, sitting more than a dollar overhead. There's confluence at that level too — the heaviest-traded price of the past 30 days, the volume point of control, sits at $8.56, right underneath the wall. Price remembers where the volume lived. The same expiry drew the morning's biggest put trade — 224 contracts at the $7 strike into 1,497 of open interest. October is thin by comparison. After Friday the map gets much lighter, and lighter maps move faster in both directions.

The calendar does the rest

The Fed decides Wednesday, and futures are pricing high odds of a hike. Triple witching hits Friday. Then ECOC — Europe's largest optical communications event — opens in Málaga on September 21, where POET's Blazar light source engine is up for an industry award. The first trading session after Friday's cleanup is also the first session of ECOC week. The company has said additional announcements and updates are expected in September.

Our discipline hasn't changed since earnings week: on forced-flow days, the tape is positioning, not verdict. Monday's selling was about an essay, an oil chart, and a bond yield — none of it was about photonics demand. The gap did the damage; the session absorbed it, mostly in the dark. What matters for $POET is where the stock stands after Friday clears the board, with a lighter map and a catalyst week ahead.